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IHEPCCC/HEPiX benchmarking WG

Helge Meinhard / CERN-IT

LCG Management Board

11 December 2007

IHEPCCC/HEPiX Benchmarking WG - 2

History (1)

• Autumn 2006: IHEPCCC chair contacts HEPiX conveners about help on two technical topics– File systems– (CPU) Benchmarking

• HEPiX meeting at Jefferson Lab (Oct 2006) reacted favourably

• Participation sorted out– Chairs: Maslennikov (CASPUR): File systems, HM

(CERN): Benchmarking

• File system WG started immediately… not so the Benchmarking WG– Mea culpa… and my apologies to everyone

History (2)

• Ad-hoc discussion at HEPiX at DESY (April 2007)• HEPiX in St Louis (November 2007)

– Benchmarking track• INFN move to SI2006 (Michele Michelotto)• Update on GridKA benchmarking (Manfred Alef)• Topics around CERN benchmarking (HM)• AMD and Intel performance for lattice QCD codes (Don

Holmgren)

– 2 more formal face-to-face meetings of people interested in benchmarking, formal start of WG

• One phone conference since (30-Nov), next one scheduled for 13-Dec

WG composition

• Currently on mailing list:– Ian Gable (U Victoria)– Alex Iribarren (CERN)– Helge Meinhard (CERN)– Michael Barnes (Jefferson Lab)– Sandy Philpott (Jefferson Lab)– Manfred Alef (GridKA)– Michele Michelotto (INFN Padova)– Martin Bly (RAL)– Peter Wegner (DESY)

• Actively looking for participation from FNAL and SLAC• More espressions of interest to collaborate very welcome

WG plans

• Focus initially on benchmarking of processing power for worker nodes

• People who can spare a machine temporarily will announce this to the list– Standard set of benchmarks to be run

• Seek collaboration of experiments– Check how well experiments’ code scales with industry-standard

benchmarks• Fix environment

– SL 4 x86_64, 32-bit applications• Some cross-checks with SL 5

– Gcc 3.4.x, compilation options by LHC architects’ forum• Check whether other communities (CDF/D0, BaBar, …) prefer different

options• Will need gcc 4 for SPEC FP 2006

– Multi-threaded benchmarks vs. multiple independent runs

Personal observations

• Trying to get out of SI2k– No longer supported, no new results on spec.org, too – Memory footprint too small

• Strong interest to follow an industry-standard benchmark– SPEC CPU 2006 is a strong candidate– … applying our own environment

• Strong interest to cross-check with experiment code

• A lot of interest to consider power consumption as well

Conclusions

• WG has taken long to get started, but is now up and running

• Momentum is there, interest and (some) person power as well

• Needs a bit of focussing in order to ensure results are comparable

• Interim report expected at HEPiX at CERN May 2008